Free frost date widget for your website

Live preview

This is the widget itself, running exactly as it will on your page.

Add it to your site

Copy the code below and paste it into an HTML block on your page (in WordPress, use a Custom HTML block; in Squarespace or Wix, an embed or code block). It is one frame and one line of credit. Nothing else loads on your page.

Who it is for

Garden clubs, Master Gardener chapters, nurseries and garden centers, seed swaps, community gardens, school garden programs and gardening bloggers all get the same question: when is it safe to plant? A single date for a whole region hides the risk that kills transplants, and readers in a valley or on a ridge can be weeks apart. The widget answers for the station nearest each reader instead of for your whole area, so you can link to one page for every member or customer.

What it shows

A reader types a ZIP code, chooses a state and station, or lets the browser find the closest stations. The widget then shows the typical last spring frost, a later date that only one spring in ten beats, the typical first fall frost, an early date that one fall in ten sees, the number of frost-free days in a typical year and in a short one, and the hard-freeze dates at 28 °F where NOAA gives them. A fold-out table lists the odds of a frost on each probability date. If the nearest station is far away, the widget says so, because elevation and setting can move frost dates a long way.

It covers 7,247 NOAA stations. Where frost is too rare for NOAA to date, as in much of Florida, Hawaii and coastal California, or possible in any month, as on some mountain stations, the widget says that rather than showing a date.

Where the data comes from

Every date comes from NOAA's U.S. Climate Normals for 1991 to 2020, the federal thirty-year record kept by the National Centers for Environmental Information. We extracted the frost and freeze probability columns for every station without changing a value; the methodology page explains how, and the full frost dates page explains how to read each date. ZIP codes are placed using the Census Bureau's ZIP Code Tabulation Areas. The ZIP code or location a reader enters never leaves their browser.

Terms

The widget is free for any site, commercial or not. We ask only that you keep the credit line under the frame as it is. The widget carries no ads and sets no tracking cookies; we count how often it loads, as we do for our own pages (see the privacy policy). The frame adjusts to the width of your column; if your page is narrow or you want to avoid an inner scroll bar, raise the height value in the code.

Prefer a link? Point readers to the frost dates lookup or to the seed starting schedule, which counts back from the same dates. Questions or a problem with the widget: contact Frost and Seed.